In my eyes HDRMerge gives a more “realistic” look while Hugin goes more “HDRish” look, with less contrast between sky and earth. But this is matter of taste.
Processed them both using RT (using similar but not identical processing) and got this:
HDRMerge blend:
Sometimes I like one more than the other, sometimes it’s the other way round…good that we have both
I also wanted to show a version blended in Gimp using luminance masks, but the Pagoda makes that really hard to do and all my attempts weren’t great. (I failed even following the great tutrial hidden somewhere in these pages)
Looks very good, thank you for sharing! I’ve been doing a lot of this myself, sometimes with hugin, sometimes with enfuse directly, sometimes hugin’s align_image_stack. I’ve fittled with HDR from Hugin, HDRMerge, and darktable, but it generally isn’t to my taste, and find find enfuse/hugin provides results I like.
HDRMerge does not produce any looks. Well, everything has a look - I mean that making the image look one way or another is not HDRMerge’s goal. HDRMerge creates a raw file which can store a high dynamic range, but it requires further tone-mapping and processing.
Hugin has several dynamic range-related options, I’m not sure which one you used. One of them is to enfuse the bracketed images. Unlike HDRMerge, enfuse skips the high dynamic range step and goes straight to tone-mapping, using the best-exposed pixel in the final image. It too requires further processing, but not tone-mapping.
Hugin also has an option to create a HDR in the (Open)EXR and TIFF formats, but I have not tried that option. If it does what the label implies it does, then it should result in a file capable of storing a high dynamic range, but unlike the output of HDRMerge this file will not require demosaicing (the source images must already have been demosaiced).
When dealing with HDR files using libre software, one generally tone-maps them using Luminance HDR.
I generally use the blend exposures from stack (I hope this is the right translation) function. Is this using enfuse?
This gives me a fused LDR tiff. I applied the term HDRish to hint towards the trend where the darker parts of the an image are pulled up even higher then the lighter parts sometimes. And I talked of looks because i can look at the result. So someone seems to have tonmapped it on the way (probably Hugin?)
On a technical level, how does this hugin function blend exposures how does HDRMerge do it?
Or where can I read this up?
In particular, this algorithm:
Tom Mertens, Jan Kautz, and Frank van Reeth, “Exposure Fusion”, Proceedings of the 15th Pacific Conference on Computer Graphics and Applications, pages 382–390.
HDRMerge doesn’t tonemap but rather produces a file ready to be mapped to LDR.
In this case just one of RT’s exposure section curves to put contrast in specific tonal ranges. This is a little like correcting the original exposures so that various regions are in the middle contrasty range of a jpg exposure.
A very slight curve was then applied to the result from enfuse
Enfuse as far as I am aware doesn’t generate halo’s. It’s quick to use so if one of the merged images doesn’t contribute as intended it’s easy to just do another and re run with it.
It looks like the HDRMerge one is more contrasty while the other are more even. Now as HDRMerge does not tonemap, the tonemapping in that pidture was basically done in RT. But my question is, the merged file out of HDRMerge should already have luminance value information, right?
Otherwise other programs couldn’t tonemap afterwards?
I didn’t use Ajohn’s version in the comparison because you already processed it slightly.
What I try to do is to take exposures that show a particular light level well in the camera jpg’s but tending to be on the dark side rather than bright. A typical camera jpg is raw converted with a simple s curve so if the light level being shot is in the linear part of that the contrast will generally be as it should be and there will be room for adjustment if needed.
I shoot in any old conditions and often find that a normal exposure will leave shadows so take 2 one over exposed. Then when I get home I usually finish up wondering why I took the shot in the first place. I don’t do much deliberate HDR work at all but have recently tried shooting stained glass windows.
I shoot in any old conditions and often find that a normal exposure will leave shadows so take 2 one over exposed. Then when I get home I usually finish up wondering why I took the shot in the first place. I don’t do much deliberate HDR work at all but have recently tried shooting stained glass windows.